I’ve spent some time and attention getting to know and integrate my inner-male and female elements. As with the willingness required to cultivate any on-going relationship, it’s an ongoing dialogue. These stood out from my own experience…
Meeting the Women
I took myself on a personal retreat and had with me a book by Diana Richardson called Tantric Orgasm for Women. I was reading it, and attempting meditation/awareness exercises, as if I was a women.
I had already been practising an internal sensing of my sexual energy – taking my attention and awareness into my perineum and genitals. Now I did it, sensing into an imaginary vagina, feeling what it must be like to have this volume inside that can be occupied and receive energy. As I felt into it with my awareness I allowed my body to move with the sensation. With my hands I gently explored my imaginary breasts – their soft shape, and expanded texture. Playing with subtle sensations, changes of pressure and responsive movement, energy began to swirl throughout my glorious body. Eventually I was dancing with the earth as though riding a massive penis that rose from it and pierced my entire orgasmic body.
A powerful experience I’m unlikely to forget.
Meeting the Man
In a sense, this was/is a lot more difficult for me. I’ve always loved, admired and appreciated the majestic beauty of women and their feminine forms. Maleness and male genitalia in particular was simply hideously revolting. Meeting the man therefor began by being aware of the strength of this loathing, and realising with shock that that was probably how I related to my own body and sexuality. That realisation alone explained so much of my lost sexuality.
So my journey with this has been to develop a different attitude – to change my thinking. I’ve done so by taking an interest in the male form – creating a curiosity that allows me to appreciate and admire it as human and part of nature’s beauty. I find opportunities to step out of my habitual denial and cross boundaries in symbolic and often humorous ways. Doing so has notably relaxed and softened my sexuality, allowing me experience myself in a far more emotional and connected way.
The Man Seeing the Women
I did an exercise where my inner-masculine and feminine had a conversation. It was revealing. I’d always felt the women in my life were holding me back. With shock what I uncovered was the opposite. Once past the blame part of the conversation, with each standing in their own responsibility, my feminine expressed a desire to expand, experience, embrace – to be seen and touched – to be celebrated. My masculine was simply intimidated and afraid of this potentially marvellous and divine goddess.
Doesn’t this sound frighteningly familiar – archetypal of our patriarchal gender divide? I thought I was above all that, yet here it plays out in my own subconscious psyche. Certainly what I gained from this is a clear indication that I hold myself back, and that projecting this onto my SO is just not cool!